Francis French, who is the director of education at the San Diego Air and Spance Museum, stands with a lunar capsule at the museum on Tuesday in San Diego, California.
— Eduardo Contreras

These are heady days at NASA. The rover Curiosity is performing so well on Mars, it influenced the space agency to move ahead with yet another Mars mission.

The mission, set to launch in 2016, will be called InSight. It’s meant to study Mars’ interior, with a special eye on seismicity.

The decision prompts hopes that NASA is regaining its footing after years of problems with the space shuttle program and International Space Station.

We turned to Francis French for insight on the space agency’s future. French is a highly respected aerospace author who also serves as education director at the San Diego Air & Space Museum in Balboa Park.

Artist's rendering of Curiosity using its "chem-cam" to analyze the composition of rocks and soil on Mars.
NASA/JPL

Artist's rendering of Curiosity using its "chem-cam" to analyze the composition of rocks and soil on Mars.

Q: NASA received a lot of criticism last summer when the space shuttle program ended. There was a feeling that the program didn’t accomplish all of its goals. Now, the space agency is getting lots of praise for landing Curiosity on Mars. Does NASA have its mojo back, or is this simply one highly successful engineering feat?

A: I don’t think NASA ever lost its mojo. It is simply in a state of enormous transition, and needs time, money and steady political support to adapt successfully. Yet so much is judged on the events of one day. If one tiny element of the rover’s landing system had not worked and the lander had failed, the reaction would have been totally different. I feel for them, as an agency and as individuals, because that really isn’t fair. I like to look at the wider picture.

NASA is operating a space station the size of a football field that is whizzing over our heads right now, with American astronauts onboard doing incredible work. There are NASA scientific satellites orbiting earth, studying just about everything you can think of, other probes orbiting Mars, others flying out into deep space to study comets, asteroids, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto and beyond. Some have been flying for decades, beyond the edge of our solar system. NASA is exploring further in other ways, with space telescopes peering into the farthest reaches of the universe. They’ve been doing this sort of exciting exploration for decades.

Tracks from the Mars rover Curiosity's first test drive include the name of its maker, 'JPL' spelled out in Morse code.
NASA/JPL

Tracks from the Mars rover Curiosity's first test drive include the name of its maker, 'JPL' spelled out in Morse code.

There are thousands of dedicated people at NASA just itching to do more amazing stuff like this. All we have to do, as a nation, is give them the steady funds to do it.

Q: NASA’s computer servers nearly crashed the night that Curiosity landed on Mars, and the agency’s website has been getting a lot of traffic since then. Why does Mars have such a hold on the public’s imagination?

A: I think it’s a concept that we can all understand. It’s hard to explain the importance of submillimeter wave astronomy satellites to the general public in one sentence — although that is also very important science. A Mars landing? We all get that. We put ourselves in the frame, imagining what it would be like to stand there and see it with our own eyes. It’s the next place in the universe that we haven’t been to in person, that we can see ourselves standing on in the near future. It looks enough like the deserts of Earth to seem eerily familiar. Plus, let’s face it, how NASA got there was unbelievably cool. To lower a rover on cords from a hovering rocket sky crane compares to the best moments from any science fiction movie. And, unlike the movies, this actually happened. The rover hasn’t even begun its work yet, and people were transfixed. It’s a wonderfully hopeful sign of how excited people can get about science exploration.